Circulation of Knowledge and Naming Practices: Language Disorders between Francophone and Central European Contexts
Research Area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices
Michal Varchol is a doctoral candidate in Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno. His research focuses on linguistic manifestations in neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, and on the ways in which these phenomena are named, interpreted and stabilised across different linguistic and professional contexts.
At the intersection of neurolinguistics, socioterminology and contrastive linguistics, his work examines the circulation of medical and linguistic knowledge between Francophone and Central European contexts. Rather than simply comparing terminological equivalents, it analyses the discrepancies, competing denominations and semantic shifts that emerge when the same language disorder is described across different languages, scientific traditions or clinical practices.
His project is based on the analysis of specialised sources — medical dictionaries, neurology books and speech therapy manuals — as well as on field data collected from healthcare professionals. This approach makes it possible to compare scholarly terminology with actual usage, particularly in interactions involving neurologists, psychologists, speech therapists and care staff.
As part of his association with CEFRES, Michal Varchol aims to broaden the French-Czech perspective of his research towards a wider Central European framework by integrating Slovak. The aim is to better understand how medico-linguistic categories are transformed as they circulate between languages, institutions and professional communities.
Ultimately, this research seeks to lay the groundwork for a reasoned multilingual glossary of language disorders. Unlike a simple list of translation equivalents, this tool would highlight the differences between theoretical definitions, specialised usage and field practices, in order to account for the real complexity of clinical knowledge in circulation.